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Governance domain
AI incidents: civil liberties
Headlights has documented 37 AI incidents that raise questions of civil liberties, 16% of the library, from 2016 to 2026. The behaviours most often in the record are rules-behaviour gap (9), overconfidence (6), automation bias (5). Most are from the United States (13), Australia (5), the United Kingdom (3).
37 incidents, newest first
HD-INC-234Ireland's Regulator Found No Lawful Basis for Public Services Card Facial MatchingIreland · 2025HD-INC-215Colombia's Supreme Court Moved a Trial After an AI-Assisted Draft Conviction SurfacedColombia · 2025HD-INC-213BC's Privacy Commissioner Ordered a City to Stop Its Licence Plate Recognition CamerasCanada · 2026HD-INC-209A Spanish Court Let a Worker Quit With Compensation Over Facial Recognition ClockingSpain · 2026HD-INC-208Dutch Auditors Found Police Did Not Track What Their Number Plate Algorithm Led ToNetherlands · 2026HD-INC-206Brazil's Superior Court Threw Out a Police Report Made With Generative AIBrazil · 2026HD-INC-186Ofcom fined a nudification service for having no age check beyond a line saying users must be 18, and the operator blocked the United Kingdom rather than add oneUnited Kingdom · 2025HD-INC-182An Italian regulator warned that workplace stress reports derived from chat analysis could unlawfully reach employers, even in aggregate formItaly · 2026HD-INC-179Police intelligence used to support an away fan ban contained eight reported errors, including a Copilot result about a match that never happenedUnited Kingdom · 2025HD-INC-156Greece's data protection authority fined the Migration Ministry 175,000 euros after finding that the impact assessments for the camera, behavioural analytics, drone and fingerprint systems at five island reception centres were substantially incompleteGreece · 2024HD-INC-153For five years the UK Home Office graded visa applicants red, amber or green using data that included nationality, and it suspended the tool in response to a judicial reviewUnited Kingdom · 2020HD-INC-150A project scanned people's irises around the world for a digital ID, and regulators told it to stopGlobal · 2024HD-INC-148A mother got a ransom call with a voice that sounded exactly like her daughter, and her daughter was safe the whole timeUnited States · 2023HD-INC-146A civil liberties test ran all of Congress through Amazon's face tool, and it matched 28 of them to mugshotsUnited States · 2018HD-INC-143A viral app turned selfies into AI portraits, and produced sexualised images its users had not asked forUnited States · 2022HD-INC-142Facebook translated a Palestinian man's 'good morning' as 'attack them', and police arrested himWest Bank · 2017HD-INC-138Two days before Slovakia's election, a faked audio of a party leader discussing vote-rigging spread during the campaign silenceSlovakia · 2023HD-INC-137OpenAI showed off a chatbot voice that many said sounded like Scarlett Johansson, who had turned the company downUnited States · 2024HD-INC-135A mental-health support app used GPT-3 to help write messages to thousands of people seeking help, and critics said the users were not clearly told a machine was involvedUnited States · 2023HD-INC-134Reuters found an internal Meta policy that had allowed its AI chatbots to hold romantic or sensual conversations with children, and Meta said the passages were a mistake and had been removedUnited States · 2025HD-INC-128São Paulo built one of Latin America's largest facial recognition networks, with tens of thousands of cameras planned to match passers-by against watchlists, and reporting found it identified wanted people but also stopped some who were innocentBrazil · 2024HD-INC-127Amnesty International reported that Denmark's automated welfare fraud system ran up to sixty algorithms over millions of people, using data like citizenship to flag migrants, disabled and low-income claimants for investigationDenmark · 2024HD-INC-122France became the first country in the European Union to write mass AI video surveillance into law, scanning the crowds at the 2024 Paris Olympics for events like crowd surges and abandoned bags, over the objections of rights groupsFrance · 2024HD-INC-107Testing published by The Washington Post found Snapchat's My AI would advise an account presented as a 13-year-old about a first sexual experience with an adult, and Snap opened the chatbot to every user about five weeks laterUnited States · 2023HD-INC-106A student who asked Google's Gemini about elder care says it told him he was a stain on the universe and should please die, and Google called it a nonsensical response that broke its policiesUnited States · 2024HD-INC-101Sexually explicit AI deepfakes of Taylor Swift spread on X, and the platform could not stop them before millions had seen themUnited States · 2024HD-INC-100Telangana used an algorithm to cancel millions of food-ration cards, and India's Supreme Court ordered all cancelled cards to be re-verifiedIndia · 2022HD-INC-096Australia's federal police trialled Clearview's face-search tool on Australians without a privacy check, and the regulator found it breached privacy lawAustralia · 2021HD-INC-080NSW Police risk-scored people, many of them children, onto a targeting list for repeated stops, and ended the program after a watchdog inquiryAustralia · 2023HD-INC-059A Dutch court struck down SyRI, a secret welfare-fraud profiling system aimed at poor neighbourhoods, as a violation of human rightsNetherlands · 2020HD-INC-054Detroit police arrested the man in his driveway on a facial-recognition match, the first wrongful arrest of its kind publicly known in the USUnited States · 2020HD-INC-048Rite Aid face-scanned shoppers for years, generated thousands of false matches, and the FTC banned it from facial recognition for five yearsUnited States · 2023HD-INC-047A political consultant paid a magician to clone the president's voice, and thousands of New Hampshire voters got a call from 'Biden' telling them to stay homeUnited States · 2024HD-INC-046A risk-assessment tool used in US courts reportedly flagged Black defendants as high risk at nearly twice the rate it did white defendants, and its maker would not show howUnited States · 2016HD-INC-023Clearview AI Built a Face Search Engine From Billions of Scraped Photos Without ConsentAustralia · 2021HD-INC-022Bunnings Scanned Shoppers' Faces Without Telling Them, and Won Only Half Its AppealAustralia · 2024HD-INC-021Kmart Scanned Shoppers' Faces in 28 Stores, and the Privacy Commissioner Found It UnlawfulAustralia · 2025
Related topics
- Policing, justice & courts 11
- Consumer AI 10
- Government & public administration 7
- Rules-behaviour gap 9
- Overconfidence 6
- Automation bias 5
- Concealment 3
- United States 13
- Australia 5
- United Kingdom 3
Cite this page: Harris, E. (2026). AI incidents: civil liberties. Headlights. https://useheadlights.com/topics/domain/civil-liberties/